v0.1.2 adds menu-bar hiding, optional Space-switch hotkeys, and better Mission Control detection on macOS 27. It includes the Space-switching and workspace boundary fixes from v0.1.1. See updating to rebuild your installed copy.
Swiping between macOS desktop workspaces is a core part of how I personally work. I might have one Figma file open in fullscreen on one space, another open fullscreen in another space, and every other app that I am interacting with likely is in a fullscreen space dedicated to the app. It's how I prefer to work. I swipe between these tabs like a mad-man. I use this to reference a design, go back and forth between spaces quickly and frequently.
There's only one problem... If you work like this, you will know that whenever you 3-finger swipe between these spaces on macOS, there is a slight delay between when you swipe and when you can actually click on something post-swipe. That delay is slight. 150ms or so (I measured.) But 150ms fifty times in an hour is 7.5 seconds. 7.5 seconds each hour you work is about 60 seconds per day. It's death by a thousand cuts.
This is my contribution to the flow state.
— Riley Hennigh
When you swipe between macOS Spaces with three fingers, the system plays a slide animation and queues your input until the transition finishes — roughly half a second of dead time on every switch, during which clicks and keystrokes go nowhere. strafe removes that dead time. It intercepts the swipe and jumps straight to the neighboring Space, so the switch is instant and the new Space is interactive immediately.
It runs as a menu-bar accessory (no Dock icon), works with your normal 3-finger swipe, and adds keyboard shortcuts and a small CLI.
The number that matters: after you switch Spaces, how long until the landed window actually accepts your input. macOS queues input until its transition finishes; strafe collapses the transition, so the queue never builds.
Measured on a MacBook Pro (Apple M3 Pro, 18 GB, macOS 26.3), 20 trials per mode, zero timeouts (full video):
| time to interactivity (median) | native swipe | with strafe |
|---|---|---|
| first event delivered to the landed window | 168.5 ms | 49.6 ms |
| transition complete (input unlocks) | 164.4 ms | 42.3 ms |
Native ranged 149–185 ms across trials; strafe ranged 30–79 ms — strafe's slowest switch beat native's fastest by nearly half. Two honest caveats: the native figures are a lower bound on what a human feels (the clock starts at gesture start, and a real swipe adds your own finger-travel time on top), and native duration grows with gentler swipe velocity — a variable strafe eliminates entirely. Both modes are measured identically by the same harness.
Reproduce it yourself with the bench harness, which documents the full methodology and its caveats.
Copy this into Claude Code (or any coding agent) and it will handle everything except the one click macOS reserves for you:
Set up strafe (https://github.com/rileycx/strafe), a macOS utility that makes
Space switching instant. Steps:
1. Clone the repo and read SECURITY.md, then skim the source (~1,486 lines,
no dependencies) and confirm the claims hold: the event tap mask covers
only gesture events, and there is no network, subprocess, or file-write
code. Tell me what you found before proceeding.
2. Run ./Scripts/bundle.sh and move build/strafe.app to /Applications.
3. Launch it, then open System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility
so I can grant it permission. Remove any stale strafe entries first.
4. Wait for me to confirm I granted it, then quit strafe from the menu-bar
icon and relaunch it — the event tap is only created at launch, so the
grant does nothing until the app restarts.
5. Have me test a 3-finger swipe between Spaces. It should be instant.
The audit step is not decoration: strafe asks for Accessibility, so make your agent verify the code before you run it. It's small enough that it actually can.
The instant space-switching technique strafe uses — synthesizing a
high-velocity Dock-swipe CGEvent with near-zero progress, and intercepting
your real trackpad swipe with an active event tap — was invented and first
implemented by jurplel in
InstantSpaceSwitcher (MIT).
The concept and the original implementation are entirely jurplel's work. strafe
is an independent reimplementation of that idea; if you want the original, go
give InstantSpaceSwitcher a star. See LICENSE for the full
acknowledgment and their copyright notice.
The macOS 27 gesture payload support is adapted from joshuarli/iss (0BSD), which identified the embedded IOHID data now required for synthetic Space switches.
strafe is distributed as source only — there is no prebuilt binary to trust.
You build the code you can read. That means you need Apple's command line tools
(xcode-select --install, a ~1.5 GB one-time download) and a Swift 6.3 or newer
toolchain.
git clone https://github.com/rileycx/strafe strafe && cd strafe
./Scripts/install.shinstall.sh builds strafe.app, copies it to /Applications, launches it, and
opens the Accessibility pane. Grant permission there, then quit strafe from its
menu-bar icon and launch it again — the event tap is created at launch, so the
grant does nothing until the app restarts.
Read the script first if you like; it's about 90 lines and does nothing
privileged.
If you'd rather do it by hand, ./Scripts/bundle.sh just builds
build/strafe.app and leaves it there for you to drag over yourself.
One wrinkle worth knowing: the bundle is ad-hoc signed, and ad-hoc signatures are content-based. Every rebuild looks like a different app to macOS, so after you update you will have to re-grant Accessibility and delete the stale entry from the list.
The app is about 1,486 lines of Swift and C with no third-party dependencies —
swift build finishes in seconds and you can read the whole thing. See
SECURITY.md.
From your existing clone:
git pull --ff-only
./Scripts/install.shBecause local builds are ad-hoc signed, remove the old strafe entry in
System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility, add the updated
/Applications/strafe.app, and enable it. Quit and reopen strafe afterward.
Version 0.1.1 uses the new gesture format only on macOS 27 and later. Earlier versions retain the original switching path and the minimum remains macOS 15. This update was tested on macOS 27.0; older macOS versions have not been retested.
-
3-finger swipe — just works once strafe is running and has Accessibility. Swipe left/right between Spaces and the switch is instant.
-
Keyboard —
ctrl+opt+←andctrl+opt+→switch Spaces. Turn off Space-switch hotkeys in the menu if these conflict with another app. Swipes keep working.strafe hotkeys offandstrafe hotkeys onalso update a running copy without restarting it. -
Menu bar — click the strafe icon to enable/disable interception, check whether Accessibility has been granted, and see which version you're running and where to get a newer one.
-
Transition speed (menu bar › Transition speed) — if instant is too abrupt, you can trade some of it back for animation:
preset measured what it is Instant ~40 ms the default: no slide at all Quick ~80 ms a hint of motion Smooth ~110 ms a visible but short slide Nothing slower is offered. The next step up measures ~170 ms, which is macOS's own animated switch — and that is already what you get with strafe turned off.
-
Hide from menu bar (menu bar › Hide from menu bar) — hide the strafe icon from the menu bar. The app keeps running: swipes and shortcuts still work. To get the icon back, open strafe again. The icon also returns on every fresh launch.
-
CLI:
strafe switch left|right # switch once and exit strafe status # print accessibility / tap status strafe speed [preset] # show or set transition speed strafe hotkeys [on|off] # show or set Space-switch hotkeys strafe # start the menu-bar app
strafe needs Accessibility permission, and only that. macOS requires it to create an active event tap — the kind that can suppress the slow animated swipe and replace it with the instant one.
The tap sees only trackpad gesture and dock-control events. It does not see keystrokes: the event mask excludes key events entirely, and strafe has no network, telemetry, file access, or subprocess code. It saves your transition speed and hotkey preferences; AppKit also saves menu-bar icon visibility, which strafe resets on launch. See SECURITY.md for the exact file and line pointers.
To revoke: System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility, and toggle strafe off (or remove it from the list).
- Quit strafe from its menu-bar menu.
- Delete
strafe.app. - Remove its entry from System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility.
- Remove saved settings:
defaults delete com.rileycx.strafe.
That's everything. strafe writes no caches or databases; the saved menu settings are the only app data it can leave behind.
macOS generates a "Dock swipe" event for a real 3-finger horizontal swipe. strafe posts a synthetic one with an artificially near-zero progress and a very high velocity. The high velocity makes the WindowServer treat the gesture as a flick and skip the slide animation, jumping instantly to the neighboring Space. At the same time an active event tap suppresses your real swipe so the OS never runs its own animated version. For the field-by-field derivation, read docs/SPEC.md.
- macOS 15 or newer
- Apple Silicon (that is what strafe is built and tested on)
If an older build opens but swipes do nothing on macOS 27, rebuild and install the current source. macOS 27 requires an embedded IOHID payload on synthetic gestures and reverses their direction encoding. This build handles both at runtime, retaining the existing gesture format on earlier macOS versions.
After replacing an ad-hoc signed build, remove the stale strafe entry in
System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility, add the updated
/Applications/strafe.app, enable it, and relaunch strafe.
The timings above were measured on macOS 26.3; they are not macOS 27 benchmarks.
Thanks to these contributors:
- Maroun Najjar (@thecolormaroun) for the Space-switch hotkey toggle in PR #4.
- Matteo Sandrin (@matteosandrin) for menu-bar hiding in PR #5.
- Ozair Khan (@Ozdotdotdot) for investigating macOS 27 support and contributing the Mission Control detection fix in PR #2, adapted in PR #6.
MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 Riley Hennigh. See LICENSE, which also carries the acknowledgment and MIT notice for jurplel's InstantSpaceSwitcher.